>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Two Parades

I can’t now remember why I was walking up Whitehall on a Saturday morning in July, but I think I must have gone to photograph a protest that had been advertised to take place in Parliament Square that didn’t happen. That would not be too unusual, as it is very easy to create an event on Facebook, but actually getting people to turn up is often harder. And although quite a few people may click to say they are interested or going they may well not actually turn up.

Fortunately in London though some things may not happen, there are others that take place which I’ve not known about beforehand, and if I have any interest in them I will stop and take a few pictures.

Fourteen years earlier, I’d photographed a Belgian commemoration of victims of the Second World War at the Cenotaph, with some veterans and their widows in attendance. Apparently this annual celebration had started before that war, following the death of King Albert I of Belgium, a keen climber who died after falling down a Belgian mountain in February 1934. Albert’s uncle, King George V, decided to grant them the annual ceremony to honour him and the Belgian contribution to the Great War.

Judging from my photographs the event back in 2005 was very much less formal than this year’s more military event, where barriers kept me off the road and behind the curious tourists lining them. This year I hardly stopped to take pictures as I was on my way along the street, a little annoyed that I couldn’t catch a bus instead of walking to Leicester Square.

The parade from Leicester Square that I was hurrying to, the The Vegan For Life Parade, was described as a fun parade through central London to promote a vegan lifestyle. While not wishing to be anti-vegan – and I certainly think eating less meat and other animal products is a good thing – fun is not a word I associate with vegans, who usually seem to be in hectoring mode, so a ‘fun’ protest seemed a good idea, and probably more effective at converting people to the cause.

And while there was just a little of that self-righteous vegan evangelistic zeal many of the posters and placards were rather more humourous and less confrontational than at other vegan events I’ve photographed.

I couldn’t stay for the march, which started late, as I wanted to go back to Extinction Rebellion’s East London Uprising where an event was about to start on Hackney Fields.

Belgians commemorate Second World War victims (scroll down the page)
Belgian Army Cenotaph Parade

Vegan for Life Parade

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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IWGB welcomes new Vice Chancellor

Although Universities like to present themselves as centres of enlightenment, when it comes to their relationship with workers who provide vital services to them, things are rather different. Unions including the IWGB have a long record of fighting and eventually winning battles against intransigent university managements for the London Living Wage and for better terms and conditions of service.

The IWGB, supported by other unions, after a series of protests and strikes in the ‘3 Cosas’ campaign won improved sick pay and holiday pay for outsourced workers at the University of London (Central Administration). But outsourced workers employed by contracting companies to work for the university are still under far worse conditions than those directly employed by the university, and often subject to poor and bullying managers, and a new campaign began in 2017 to bring them into direct employment.

Actions by IWGB members and its supporters – including many university students and staff – forced to the University to make a committment to bring the workers in-house, but a year later this promise was still to be kept, with only 12 receptionists having been brought back to direct employment

This action followed a failure of the newly appointed University Vice-Chancellor Wendy Thomson to reply to the IWGB’s request for a meeting to discuss the issue. Instead of talking with the IWGB union about their demand for all the workers to be taken into direct employment without delay the University has been spending large amounts on buying in extra security staff.

Although the great majority of the staff involved are now IWGB members, the University continues to take advantage of our immoral trade union laws which enable them to ignore the union and instead only officially talk and negotiate with a union which has no or very few members among the workers involved.

To their great shame our larger established trade unions collude with this practice – and even often claim the credit for concessions which have only been won because of the work of the IWGB and other grass roots unions who similarly remain unrecognised by the employers. Workers have a right to choose who should recognise them, and this is something that the unions once fought for but now too often refuse to support.

The 12 receptionists were given new contracts in May 2019, but these were negotiated with another union “behind their backs and behind the back of their chosen trade union, the IWGB“, and 7 of the 12 have brought grievances against the university, some of which involve a breach of transfer of employment (TUPE) regulations.

Since this protest, the University have also set a timetable to bring the security officers in-house in May 2020 and cleaners in-house in November 2020, but have refused to bring the gardeners also involved back in house.

The IWGB are continuing to demand that the gardeners are also brought back in house and that any new contracts should be made in consultation with the union to which the workers belong and be approved by them.

More about the protest and more pictures at IWGB welcome new Vice Chancellor

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

March for Clean Air

Extinction Rebellion East London had organised a whole weekend of event , a festival of play, protest and education, the East London Uprising calling for a rapid end to the use of fossil fuels.

Apart from their huge contribution to our increasing carbon dioxide levels which are leading to unprecedented man-made global heating the will put the future of humanity at risk, the pollution levels already present in London and other cities from coal, petrol and fuel oils which pollute the air with toxic chemicals and particulates is already causing many thousands to suffer from various often serious lung diseases and is estimated to lead to almost 10,000 early deaths in London alone.

The marchers met in a small open space called Paradise Gardens, between the busy Cambridge Heath Road and houses in Paradise Row. It may have seemed like paradise when these houses were built in the late 18th and early 19th century, and doubtless they are now horrifically expensive, but this paradise is now highly polluted.

The march set off from Bethnal Green to Hackney behind a banner ‘The Air That We Grieve’, and included a marching jazz band, and of course plenty of families with children. As well as the jazz band there were samba drummers, and the ‘king of the bottle tops’ and others.

The march attracted considerable interest as it went up the Cambridge Heath Road, with many expressing support. But there was no general uprising and perhaps there are releatively few who are actually changing the way they behave, changing to lower carbon lifestyles as we all need to do. It requires a much greater urgency from a government which is prepared to make statements but not to take on the vested short-term interests of many of its backers by significant green investments and policies that will really impact on personal choices.

More pictures from the event at XR East London marches for clean air

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Mayfair Mayhem

I don’t like going to Mayfair. Too much conspicuous consumption on display, too much affluence and waste. It isn’t envy – mostly I wouldn’t want those excessively expensive things you see in shops and through windows, nor the expensive menus etc. I’m largely a man of simple tastes, and happier to share expensive works of art in the National Gallery rather than hang them on my own private wall.

In part its the people. Though I’ve known and liked some who are wealthy there are too many who are obnoxious, who look on the people who work for them as dirt, or just couldn’t give a jot about others. Of course there are poor people who are obnoxious too, but generally in ways that are less obtrusive.

Clubs like LouLou’s with a ‘exclusive’ tag and a membership (in 2017) of £1,800 and described by a fawning article on the Observer website as “the place to be for royals, billionaires, A-list celebrities and socialites” seems to be a magnet for the uncaring and obnoxious, run by the son of Lady Annabel Goldsmith who has given more than £268,000 to Nigel Farage’s UKIP and donated £20,000 to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.

But despite this huge wealth, LouLou’s pays its kitchen porters a pittance, and the IWGB has been supporting their claim for the London Living Wage of £10.55 per hour and for decent terms and conditions of service such as sick pay. Currenly the porters who are mainly migrant workers get only £9 per hour. This was I think their second protest outside the club.

Henry Chango-Lopez, President of the IWGB, said:
“It is unfair that the porters who allow billionaires to wine and dine in luxury and secrecy are left hung out to dry. The porters can see straight through 5 Hertford Street’s bribes and know that outsourcing will only lead to further exploitation. The restaurant needs to give justice to its workers and put them all under the same banner.”
https://iwgb.org.uk/en/post/5cf8f67de9521/iwgb-demands-end-to-poverty

I think it was a genuine accident when police knocked one of the protesters to the ground, an officer walking backward into him. But the whole attitude of the police was deferential to the club owners, their security men and guests but hostile towards the protesters, two of whom were arrested.

More at IWGB demand living wage at LouLou’s .

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Robert Frank’s London

I’ve long been an admirer of Robert Frank’s pictures taken in London, and you can see a fine selection of these in the feature Extraordinary Black And White Photographs Of London In The Early 1950s.

There are at least two videos paging through the book London Wales on You Tube, and I recommend that by Алексей Гуменюк only because I think he is a better page-turner, though his commentary and the sound track perhaps add a certain charm – but you can turn the sound off if it annoys you. Of course if you have read my earlier thoughts on the book or otherwise bought it you can turn the pages yourself. It’s better.

Frank’s London is a city (and City) long lost, with men in bowler hats and men carrying sacks of coal, both enshrouded by the pea-soupers which the coal produced (and in the second part of the book, he goes to photograph the men who mined it.)

Thankfully those days of almost solid air in London are long gone, though I can just remember them. But appearances are deceptive and London’s air is still toxic, leading to huge amounts of miserable illness and an estimated almost 10,000 early deaths each year, with levels of pollutants typically well above the EU legal limits in many streets and schoolyards.

The City too has changed, though still equally toxic. We no longer have an Empire – it had already begun to disappear when Frank coughed his way through those streets, but neo-colonialism has replaced colonialism, and many of the world’s most toxic companies – for example in mining – are still London based, and the City is the money laundering capital of the world.

Merchants of Death

At the end of the month that this protest tour took place, the UK government issued its UK Defence & Security Export Statistics for 2018. These revealed that UK arms sales in 2018 amounted to £14bn, making the UK the world’s second biggest arms exporters, with around half the sales of the USA. Britain had 19% – almost a fifth of global arms sales – well ahead in 2018 of competitors Russia at 14% and France with 9%.

Most UK sales are to the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE in particular purchasing large quantities of UK arms. Over the 10 year period covered by the report, the Middle East accounted for 60% of UK arms sales, though in 2018 it was around 77%. One factor in that increase was the war in Yemen.

According to CAAT (Campaign Against Arms Trade),

The UK has licensed over £4.7 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since the bombing began in March 2015.

The weapon categories include approximately:
£2.7 billion worth of ML10 licences (Aircraft, helicopters, drones)
£1.9 billion worth of ML4 licences (Grenades, bombs, missiles, countermeasures)
https://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/stop-arming-saudi/arms-sales

UK weapons used in Yemen include Typhoon and Tornado aircraft and ALARM missiles from BAE systems, Paveway bombs from Raytheon, PGM500 bombs and Brimstone and Storm Shadow missiles from MBDA as well as UK-made cluster bombs which were exported from the UK in the 1980s. There are more details about the companies currently exporting arms to Saudi Arabia on the CAAT site.

As well as protesting, CAAT took the government to court over British-made arms being used in Yemen, and on 20th June 2019 the Court of Appeal ruled that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen was unlawful. The government are fighting this decision, taking it to the Supreme Court but had to apologise in September for “inadvertantly” breaking the ban over two export licences.

I joined the tour late after being held up by overcrowding led to a slow queue to get into the tube station and then down to the platforms due to Pride, and the crowds around Lower Regent Street made it impossible for the tour to visit the offices of Lockheed Martin. But I was present for the visits to G4S, Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, as well as for the speeches about Lockheed Martin – with each company being presented with a ‘blue plaque’ for their sins.

The highlight of the tour was the stop outside Buckingham Palace, where the plaque (complete with spelling mistake) was simply for their support of King Hamad in his violent repression of the people of Bahrain. But in the speeches we heard how the Royal Family played an important role with their visits backing arms sales around the world. Prince Andrew has been in the news recently for other reasons, but here was singled out for his services, in arms sales to corrupt regimes. Since it wasn’t possible to approach Buckingham Palace more closely, the blue plaque for the palace was left on the Victoria Monument facing it.

More from the tour at London’s Sinister Arms Trade

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Pride should be a Protest

After around 20 years of photographing the annual Pride in London I decided I had had enough. As I’ve written often before, Pride has moved from being a protest for gay rights to becoming a corporate jolly, and this year charging entry fees that have prevented many of the more radical groups from taking part officially.

So this year I didn’t bother to apply for accreditation to cover Pride, something which has become more or less essential in recent years. And later I heard that Pride had tried to refuse accreditation to many press photographers as well as more or less banning those they did accredit from where they would be able to make decent pictures. After a great deal of aggravation and complaints from the NUJ and BPPA there were some compromises, but many colleagues decided to have a day off this year.

Two years ago instead of covering the official march I’d gone with the Migrants Rights and Anti-Racist Bloc who had tried to join in the event and when they were refused had held up Pride and then marched along the route ahead of the official event. And last year I’d gone into the suburbs while Pride was taking place for a march celebrating the 70th anniversary of the NHS and against plans to close acute facilities at Epsom and St Helier Hospitals in south London.

For 2019 I decided that there were two events I wanted to cover, one completely unrelated to Pride, but the other the Queer Liberation March in protest against the increasing corporate nature of Pride which was planning to march at the end of the official parade.

This was meeting in Regent’s Park, where some of those taking part in the official event were also gathering, and at first it was difficult to tell the two groups apart. Gradually as some left to take up their place in Pride things became clearer, and it also became clear that I was in for a very long wait before anything was going to happen as Pride was moving only very slowly.

I’m not good at waiting, and decided to go and join the unrelated event, intending to return later. My journey took me much longer than expected because of the crowds for Pride, and by the time I had finished photographic the second event I was feeling tired and could not be bothered to return to find the group from Regent’s Park.

It was a poor decision, as the Queer Liberation March turned out to be rather interesting. Pride stewards tried to stop them marching along the parade route and there were scuffles with stewards and police, before police decided that they must be allowed to continue. My colleague who had stayed and waited with them got some really interesting pictures and I had missed the fun.

More at Pride is a Protest

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Kids march for more school

Whatever is wrong with modern children? I just cannot imagine myself at primary school protesting at getting an extra half-day off school. We would have cheered.

Of course parents are likely to be upset. Having to find some way to look after their offspring on a Friday afternoon when in most families both parents will be at work. It must be bad enough having to make arrangements for the school holidays without this extra burden,

While I was teaching we did get the occasional day where school closed and we were sent home early, and I think we were generally rather pleased, particularly if it was a day when we were down to teach 3G last period. Though I suppose we might have got a little concerned if it were happening on a regular basis, and particularly for some of the classes who were nearing their GCSE or A level exams – and I think there were some times when these exam classes remained for lessons when others left early.

But now of course we have exams at every level, the dreaded SATs, starting in the May of Year 2, when children are only 7. Some schools add to the training in terror by making them take ‘optional SATs’ at the end of every year there isn’t a real SAT test (the next one comes for 11 year olds in Year 6.)

And teachers, particularly head teachers, are of course concerned about the results, as they place their school in the league tables. So concerned that although they only take place for a short period the SATs have come to dominate the whole year’s work in most of our schools. Schools that want to be seen as successful have had to change their whole ethos to “teach for the tests.” It shouldn’t be so.

It was of course a fiction that children were not tested before the SATs. At secondary level children came to us with the results of properly standarised tests from the NFER, tests that were adminstered with none of the anguish and stress of the SATs, which were used to diagnose a pupil’s needs and not to judge schools and which were considerably more useful and reliable, and were not the tail wagging the dog of the school.

As parents, we sent our children to the local schools. The primary school they both went to was a happy school and well run. It tried to continue that way when the SATs came in (fortunately after our children had gone on to the local secondary) but the results of the first year were miserable compared to the other local schools that had drilled their children for the exams from the start, and they were forced to change.

This protest, though I think driven by exam pressures, was not about getting rid of the exams but about funding. Schools have suffered under austerity, and those in the more difficult areas have suffered more than those with wealthier parents, though even those have problems. Parents associations which used to raise funds for extras are now having to do so for essentials, and parents in many schools are now asked for ‘voluntary contributions’ to our free education system. Though with various reforms by both New Labour and Tories we hardly have a system, more a mess.

This protest, like so many schools, was also funded by voluntary contributions, crowdfunding led by Labour MP Jess Phillips who also led the children along Whitehall to Downing St.

Give Me Five days

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Carnaby St show

A few years ago as I was walking down Regent Street, a German tourist stopped me and asked me the way to Carnaby St. I told him he needed a time machine to go back 40 years before more helpfully pointing out the right direction.

But last Saturday I went back there for a quick look at a celebration of an event only 30 years ago, on the windows of a shop called Size?

This is a temporary display, for one week only, tracing a little of the history of a trainer, the apparently iconic Nike Air Max 90 introduced in 1990 and since with many variations, and back in 1990 I made a picture in Notting Hill in which the trainer can be clearly seen.

You can see that picture, along with two others from Notting Hill on the shop front, and also on a large screen inside the store.

My favourite of the three images is this line of girls beside a sound system on a lorry going down Ladbroke Grove. You can see these two and others in my contribution to the 2008 show, English Carnival.

The third of my images – in the picture above both on the store front and rather blue on a screen inside – is one that didn’t feture either in the 2008 show or in my recent Café Royal Book on Notting Hill, and I think may not have been published before.

All three images I think embody something of the spirit of carnival, and I was pleased to see them being used – also in some online posts and a printed catalogue from Size?.

Readers of this post who have access to academic journals on line may like to read the article Notting Hill in Carnival which features 20 of my Notting Hill pictures with text by George Mentore them (including one of those here) as well as a more general article.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

French Police brutality

Unlike many of my colleagues I’ve seldom photographed protests in France, although it’s a relatively short journey to Paris from London on Eurostar. There are several reasons why I’ve not done so, and expense is one of them, as I would be unlikely to cover the fare from the meagre fees that I normally get for use of images, so as a freelance it would make little sense to go. But even where I to be offered a commission I would almost certainly turn it down.

I have on a few occasions when I’ve been in Paris attended protests and photographed them, but I’ve never been happy doing so and have usually found good reason to leave after a short time. All those other photographers dressed in helmets and full battle gear are a little off-putting when your only head protection is a woolly hat.

I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to wear a helmet, or shin pads or kevlar vests or any of the other gear that some photographers sensibly wear to protect themselves from protesters, projectiles and police, and instead to simply keep clear as best I can of situations where these are de rigueur – which more or less rules out covering most French protests. Just occasionally I’ve had to retreat a little from the front line at some London protests too, but fortunately things seldom get so heated.

There have been times when I’ve had to dodge bricks and stones and other projectiles from protesters but most actual violence I’ve suffered has been by police who have knocked me flying, thrown me to the ground, pushed and punched me. But our police are easy-going compared to “les keufs”, who on one notable occasion in 1961 killed a couple of hundred (the exact number is not know) of Algerian protesters, beating many of them before throwing them into the Seine.

Today’s protest in front of the French Embassy was over an incident the previous weekend at a bridge over that same river in Paris. Extinction Rebellion protesters who had sat down in the roadway on the Pont de Sully were pepper-sprayed in their faces at close range causing burns; they pulled the sunglasses from one protester to spray directly into the eyes. Others were injured by being dragged forcefully across the road.

An eye-witness spoke at the protest describing what he had seen and heard, though most of those taking part had already seen and been incensed by videos of the attack posted on social media. They protesters then learnt several of the French chants and songs that the XR protesters had been singing on the Pont de Sully.

Finally there was a theatrical re-enactment of the incident, with protesters sitting on the roadway being sprayed with water by white-coated ‘police’. It was rather chaotic and difficult to photograph and it proved very tricky to actually capture water being sprayed

More pictures at Protest French police attack on XR.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.